Symmetry Is a Lie

We love to say we want “equal” relationships. Equal partners. Equal say. Equal power. It sounds emotionally evolved. It photographs well for Instagram. It’s also a fantasy—right up there with Bigfoot, unicorns, and the tooth fairy.

In 56 years of watching people couple up—as a therapist, a queer man, and a professional eavesdropper on human behavior—I have never seen a truly symmetrical relationship. Not once. Every relationship lives inside systems that are already tilted: patriarchy, class, race, age, citizenship, health, you name it. Somebody always walks in with more power. The only question is whether we admit it.

When I say asymmetry, I don’t mean soap‑opera villains or cartoonishly abusive dynamics. I mean something quieter and much more common: one person always has more of something that matters. More money. More status. More social safety. More youth. More options. More ability to leave and land on their feet. As a clinical therapist and a AI-driven growth architect, I think in both feelings and spreadsheets; in relationships, power is just another version of unit economics. Who has what resources. Who carries which risks. Who can “afford” the loss if things go bad. Pretending those numbers don’t exist doesn’t make things fair. It just makes the imbalance harder to see.

Take a straight, cisgender man and woman. On paper, they may both insist they believe in equality. Maybe she earns more, maybe they split chores, maybe he is the one home with the kids. All of that can be true. Patriarchy still walks in the door before either of them does. He gets a cultural bump he didn’t have to work for: higher earning potential on average, more physical safety moving through the world, less judgment for aging or gaining weight, more default authority in most rooms. She carries the higher risk of being disbelieved, blamed, or punished if things go bad—by family, by courts, by strangers. That’s asymmetry, baked into the operating system. You can build a loving, respectful relationship on top of it, but you don’t cancel it out by declaring yourselves “equal.”

Now take two women. Remove the man from the equation and it’s tempting to believe patriarchy just…leaves. It doesn’t. It shapeshifts. In queer and lesbian couples, I’ve watched power sort itself through other levers: who reads as more conventionally attractive, who is more “femme” or more “masc,” who has the stable job with healthcare, whose family is more supportive, who gets believed by doctors, landlords, employers, and who does not. One woman may have more money, while the other pays a higher safety tax just to exist in her body and identity. Again, the spreadsheet of power doesn’t balance, even when the love is real and mutual.

Then there are couples like mine: two men. People outside the relationship often treat us like a riddle they’re dying to solve. If gender is mostly controlled for, who has the power now? Surely somebody must be “the man” and somebody must be “the woman,” even if they’re both men. So the world reaches for other metrics.

Who makes more. Who’s older. Who’s white. Who can pass as straight in a boardroom if they need to. Who is HIV‑positive and who is not. Who tops, who bottoms, who is willing to be read as “the woman” in the relationship. These details become shorthand for “who really has the privilege here.” The honest answer is messy. Often both partners hold privilege on different axes, and both are vulnerable on others. Two men do not cancel patriarchy; they simply expose how many other ways we’ve invented to rank people when gender isn’t enough.

If all of this sounds bleak, that’s because we have spent decades selling “symmetry” as a moral gold star. Equal partnership isn’t just a description; it’s a value judgment. Equal is healthy, enlightened, modern. Unequal is backward, dangerous, suspect. So instead of admitting we live inside unequal systems, we retrofit the language. We call relationships “equal” because that’s what we want them to be, not because we’ve done the painful work of mapping where power really sits.

Symmetry is comforting because it promises control. If I can believe we are perfectly equal, I don’t have to admit that I’m scared of losing you, or that the world values your body, your passport, your paycheck more than mine. I don’t have to admit that a breakup could cost me housing, healthcare, or my visa, while you walk away with hurt feelings and a slightly awkward holiday season. Symmetry lets us pretend that heartbreak is the worst‑case scenario, when for some partners, the worst case looks a lot more like survival math.

We turn “equal partnership” into a kind of emotional aesthetic—something that reads well in a couples’ therapist’s notes and looks good on a wedding website. But underneath the language, the numbers don’t lie. One person still has more leverage at the bank, more safety with the police, more credibility with a judge or an employer or a hospital. One person still has more room to make mistakes. That is power. We don’t erase it by declaring the relationship a tie.

To be clear, none of this is an argument for staying in harmful dynamics. Not naming symmetry is not an excuse for cruelty, coercion, or control. I am not saying “all relationships are unequal, so why bother.” I’m saying the opposite: you cannot fix what you refuse to see. You cannot negotiate power if you insist that everyone walked in with the same hand of cards.

So what do we aim for if not the mythical “equal relationship”? Personally, I don’t want symmetry. I want transparency. I want two people who can say, without flinching, “Here’s where the world gives me more. Here’s where it punishes you harder. Here’s how we are going to guard each other anyway.” I want couples who can talk about money, passports, bodies, race, gender, chronic illness, and safety as openly as they talk about love languages and vacation plans.

That doesn’t mean turning your bedroom into a political science seminar. It means admitting that you live in the real world, and the real world walks into your relationship with you. It means a straight man understanding that his wife may be more at risk of losing community and support if she leaves. It means a wealthier partner acknowledging that they hold more practical power and choosing to use it in a way that builds safety instead of dependency. It means queer couples naming how gender norms, racism, fatphobia, transphobia, and ableism show up between them—because they do, even when everybody at the table votes the same way.

Symmetry is a myth; honesty doesn’t have to be. The relationships I trust the most are not the ones that claim to be equal. They’re the ones where both people can say, “This is where I have more power. This is where you do. Here’s what we’re going to do about that.” That’s not symmetrical. It’s not tidy. It is, however, grown‑up.

We should stop chasing “equal” as if it’s the prize. We don’t need equal partners. We need partners willing to look at the map of power between them and say, “I won’t pretend this is even—but I will protect you where the world does not.” That might not look as cute on Instagram. It does, in my experience, look a lot like love.

Written where human nervous systems and machine logic collide. AI‑assisted, human owned.